In recent years, activities that assist and promote social evolution of handicapped persons have been well-practiced. In U.S.A., Section 508 of Rehabilitation Act has been enforced in 2001, and similar legislation will be introduced in European countries and Japan in the future. However, in practice, it is hard to say that we have in place an environment required for handicapped persons to work well. For example, when a visually impaired person uses office equipment such as a copying machine, facsimile apparatus, and the like in an office, there are many problems to be solved.
As a technique that supports use of office equipment by a visually impaired person, voice guidance disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-302017 is known. As a means for informing a visually impaired person of the state of a copying machine, voice information disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 10-167523 is known. Both these techniques hold pre-recorded voice messages in equipment and reproduce the held voice messages in accordance with user's operations and internal states.
Some facsimile apparatuses audibly inform the user of call reception. For example, a facsimile apparatus described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 8-070378 makes character recognition of the destination of a facsimile document based on received facsimile data to specify a personal name who should receive the facsimile document, synthesizes a voice message prepared in advance, and informs that receiver of reception of the facsimile document via an extension telephone. Furthermore, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-10755 discloses a technique which makes character recognition of contents of a received facsimile document, converts the character recognition result into a voice message by speech synthesis, and reads aloud the voice message.
When a copying machine or facsimile apparatus is used without confirming the contents of a printed document, a document including errors or a document other than that to be copied or transmitted may be copied or transmitted by facsimile. Hence, a wasteful copy may be formed, or such document lead to trouble. Furthermore, in terms of waste of paper resources, omission of pages or wrong copying may be found after a large number of copies are formed.
For visually impaired persons, such problems remain unsolved even when they can use the aforementioned voice guidance, voice information function, and call reception informing function.